Johan Fabricius

Until the age of fourteen he spent most of his time in the Dutch East Indies (ten years in all) and would return for brief visits throughout his life, maintaining a strong connection to the area.

His schooling was varied; he was educated in different places in the Indies and the Netherlands, and briefly in Paris, and in the fall of 1914 he enrolled in the Hogere Burgerschool in The Hague, but soon left for the Academie van Beeldende Kunsten, where he showed a great talent for portraits, later illustrating his own books.

His breakthrough as a writer was Het meisje met de blauwe hoed, a comedic novel about a soldier's life, based on his own experiences in the military.

The three fictional characters who set sail with Bontekoe allowed for easy identification for a young audience; a statues of the three is in the harbor of Hoorn since 1968.

His experiences and impressions formed the foundation for many of his novels, which combined drama with exoticism and unusual characters, in a relaxed style full of humor and anecdotes.

The 1930s found Fabricius at the height of popularity and creativity; he produced a best-selling picaresque trilogy set in 18th-century Italy, Komedianten trokken voorbij (1931, winner of the C.W.

Before the war already he was on the fringe of the Dutch literary world and changing tastes (among critics) in the post-war period led to an evaluation of Fabricius as a writer of merely popular literature.

In addition, his stories were thought to contain mostly flat characters and lacked variation (and were written in a much too expansive a style), certainly once exoticism was no longer in vogue.

[3] Vandals stole the beautiful bronze wind vane, depicting the Nieuw Hoorn, an early 17th-century Dutch East-Indies sailing vessel (featured in his 1923 novel), from his grave.